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ATI Mobility Radeon 3470 with Fedora 11 + Thinkpad t400

07-25-2009, 08:27 PM

Hello! I recently got a Lenovo thinkpad t400. I installed Fedora 11, but to do so, I had to choose a graphics adapter: Integrated or Discrete. (this is so the BIOS doesn't mess up Linux :P) I'm using Integrated, but the performance really bites! I chose it because the Discrete is an Intel card (Linux support ) However, I can't stand it anymore. I need someone to tell me:
1. to use fglrx or radeonhd (and how)
2. how to change graphics setup to reflect completely different card

I don't know if radeonhd is safe or stable enough. It's out of the question to put a scratch in this laptop, so I can't have my display broken or anything.

I imagine the "Integrated" vs "Discrete" choice is betweeen Intel integrated and ATI/AMD discrete. I believe F11 should automatically configure the radeon driver if you pick "Discrete", but you may have to disable the integrated graphics in BIOS to make sure that the discrete GPU starts up properly. Your best bet is probably to stay with the radeon driver that gets configured automatically; the version of radeonhd in Fedora probably is not as new, and I don't think the fglrx driver will work with F11's kernel yet.

Are there any graphics selection options in your BIOS ?

Comment

Yes, there are. There are options for "switchable" (Linux incompatible, so it should be set to "discrete" or "integrated.") There are also ones like the monitor to use for bootup, and other basic things, EXCEPT for OS Detection for graphics - no idea what it does, (maybe selects a card based on OS?) but this really messes Linux up so I disabled it.

Thanks for the advice thus far!

I have another question though. If I don't want to do a fresh install, can I just switch to "discrete" in the BIOS and expect it to automatically configure it with the radeon driver on boot? Even if I tried the ATI fglrx and then uninstalled it? Thanks!

EDIT: No, changing the card and rebooting does not work. I'll have to go into runlevel 3 and load a reconfigured xorg.conf.
any further advice?